"More Of The Same". Anything That Works Will Be Used In Progressively More Challenging Situations Until It Fails.

A common scenario that I often see play out in endurance sports is when things start to work people want more of it, and at a faster rate. So they end up just doing more of what they are currently doing.

‘’More of the same’’

However, anything that works will be used in progressively more challenging situations until it fails. Meaning, we tend to conflate what caused the initial success with a strategy that scales, assuming we can simply add more of the same thing and get double the results. Because something worked in a limited context, we assume it will work indefinitely, or in any context. Training success then often sows the seeds of its own failure.

As training volume increases for example, we have less wiggle room. You're spending more adaptive energy (which is finite). You’re competing with life stressors (sleep, work, relationships). Recovery time often becomes insufficient or neglected. You need to manipulate / understand how to consolidate training stressors within your programme. You need to adjust your intensity to enable a more sustainable approach to stay consistent. Essentially, what once worked in a low stress potentially high recovery state is now being applied in a more complex system, without adjusting the system. This then becomes unsustainable. A great example is that if you run 2/3x a week all at a moderately hard effort across 5-15ks, then you add another day of the same or more distance at the same pace things start to become more challenging, harder to recover, less improvement.

The irony of this (and a recent trend) is because we know those with higher volumes track with elite endurance performance, the 80/20 polarised approach for example is often adopted to remedy higher volumes. Then sometimes people assume that the 80/20 is the structure that should be adopted for everyone all of the time. But again, it’s missing context, 80/20 is a poor balance when your training time is limited.

Importantly then what is not discussed is how to get to some of these high volumes sensibly over time for those that wish to. The key to long term progress isn’t just adding more of the same. It’s evolving your strategy to match the increased demands.

Staying with the addition of volume, one such rule you’ll see specifically in running programmes as a guide to increasing volumes is the 10% rule i.e. increasing your running volume by 10% each week. However, this assumes all tissues, systems, and people adapt the same way and at the same rate, that weekly linear progress is both possible and necessary and that volume increase = progress. It doesn’t consider training intensity, terrain, or cumulative training load.

The 10% rule is often presented by many coaches as the upper limit of safe incremental jumps in volume, but it simplistic. It was also just a general rule of caution, it was never intended to be a model of progression because it tells you nothing about adaptation... And we wonder why compliance is often terrible with run programmes.

So how should we progress?

I’ve often spoke about this before but there really is value in repeating the same session, the same volume, the same intensity for weeks if necessary. This is also relevant for those who follow concurrent & hybrid programmes who might have a minimal effective dose in one component but overall, high volumes of training and thus less adaptive energy. Too many appear to be smashing 100% of two programmes together and overshooting.

Why is this important?

Because progression should naturally emerge when what you’re doing becomes consistently easier. For example, if a 10k RPE 7 effort feels more relaxed, your heart rate is lower for the same given work, and you have less soreness or fatigue (HRV, RHR, Sleep as objective markers) then that’s a sign of positive adaptation. Most people ramp up before progression becomes an obvious choice because their programme tells them to. Whatever map you’re following it is likely not the territory, and how do you know what you’ve been doing is effective in the first place. It takes time.

I suggest you have a quick read of the progressing slowly article where it gives you an appreciation of adaptation timelines. It is an incredibly simplified visual representation, as it also assumes that we adapt in a linear fashion, we don't. But when you look at this it puts ideas around programming and progressive overload into perspective. The point being, you can’t rush anything, it’s a slow burn. What matters to keep these trending over time is consistency of training with an appropriate stimulus. That is challenged when you follow the typically prescribed idea of progressive overload... ‘6 weeks to no where’.

I also think there should always be caution when interpreting what you see online and in research. Much of the progressive volume based training literature is limited to short to medium durations, typically 6 to 12 weeks for populations who are already typically accustomed to high volumes. Much like the HIIT data showing high ROI, these studies can show statistical improvements or what is possible from higher volumes, but they don’t reflect the sustainability of such methods when scaled to you, the individual, right now. And that is what matters, right?

Long term success is not about the maximum we can get out of 12 weeks or to hit some arbitrary standard to feel ‘ready’. It's about training that is right for you currently, repeatable and sustainable... You don’t get there overnight. If people thought in years instead of 12 week blocks, the conversation around volume, intensity, overload, and performance would be drastically different.